So a user sends out a very important (in her mind) email. She decides to CC every single address in our Exchange address book including groups and pagers as well as all outside contacts. People who are in many groups get upwards of 90 emails and pages and every time someone replies to the ticket that they have no clue what the ticket is about, more go out. It was just like the scene in Brother Bear when the Ram has an argument with his echo. We don’t want to turn off the ability for users to send email to the Help Desk and have copied users added to the ticket. But in the right hands this could be compared to a denial of service attack. Any suggestions?

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Limit access to some of the larger groups in Exchange. Educate your users. Tell them that if they need to CC their boss or another emoployee or two that is great, but when it comes to notifying everyone your department will do that through a different email.

I would agree, this isn't really a Spiceworks issue as much as a PEBKAC one. The user should know better than to send to all employees. As a small company we don't limit that but I can see why it would be needed from cases like this. Training is the key here though.

you can also turn off the cc functionality for tickets under Settings > Help Desk Settings > Additional Settings. You'll still be able to add cc'd users through the help desk, but cc'd users on emails won't be added to the ticket by default

So a user sends out a very important (in her mind) email. She decides to CC every single address in our Exchange address book including groups and pagers as well as all outside contacts. People who are in many groups get upwards of 90 emails and pages and every time someone replies to the ticket that they have no clue what the ticket is about, more go out. It was just like the scene in Brother Bear when the Ram has an argument with his echo. We don’t want to turn off the ability for users to send email to the Help Desk and have copied users added to the ticket. But in the right hands this could be compared to a denial of service attack. Any suggestions?

We have an “everyone” group for each location and only a few can use it. What this person did is select ctrl-a every name in the book. No doubt it is a training issue. She is a very nice girl and I figure she has been trained rather well by this incident. My thought is outside the realm of training which as everyone knows is never good enough. I am thinking about how this could cause problems by either a disgruntled user or someone on the outside who sends an email to the helpdesk and includes thousands of cc'd users. I guess I was thinking it would be nice if you could limit how many people Spiceworks would cc. Another thing that would have been helpful is the ability to select all the cc’d users at once and delete them. I went in and turned cc off for users but with all the flurry of emails being sent out it took a while to get in. I turned on the ability to delete tickets and suspect after we discuss this tomorrow at our staff meeting that the ticket will be gone.

I agree on the feature request. To be able to send an email to HelpDesk@whatever.com and be able to cc a user and have a Spiceworks ticket open and copy that user is great. But if no upper limit is imposed the potential exists for problems and or abuse. When it was happening I thought about assigning it to myself and closing it but people were responding so mindlessly that it would have been reopened before I knew it was closed. I could have quickly deleted it but the decision was made above me to not do that. (to be discussed tomorrow) User is too nice to shoot. Besides she just found a loaded gun and had no idea how dangerous it was.

Your last reply is great! "User is too nice to shoot. Besides she just found a loaded gun and had no idea how dangerous it was." Good sense of humor and, more importantly, perspective. SOMETIMES we get upset with users when we could have done something ahead of time to prevent a situation. NOT saying this was YOUR fault, heavens no. With so many things to configure and keep track of there are bound to be some things that we don't find until after something happens. Remembering that and (re)acting appropriately helps build good will with the users, which helps them understand that we are not out to get them, which leads to better team work, which ....

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